4 Marlborough Place, November 2, 1875.

My dear Darwin,

Our secretary has telegraphed to you to Down, and written to Queen
Anne Street.

But to make sure, I send this note to say that we expect you at 13 Delahay Street [Where the Commission was sitting.] at 2 o’clock to-morrow.  And that I have looked out the highest chair that was to be got for you. [Mr. Darwin was long in the leg.  When he came to our house the biggest hassock was always placed in an arm-chair to give it the requisite height for him.]

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The Commission reported early in 1876, and a few months after Lord Carnarvon introduced a bill intituled “An Act to amend the law relating to Cruelty to Animals.”  It was a more drastic measure than was demanded.  As a writer in “Nature” (1876 page 248) puts it:  “The evidence on the strength of which legislation was recommended went beyond the facts, the report went beyond the evidence, the recommendations beyond the report, and the bill can hardly be said to have gone beyond the recommendations, but rather to have contradicted them.”

As to the working of the law, Huxley referred to it the following year in the address, already cited, on “Elementary Instruction in Physiology” ("Collected Essays” 3 310).]

But while I should object to any experimentation which can justly be called painful, and while as a member of a late Royal Commission I did my best to prevent the infliction of needless pain for any purpose, I think it is my duty to take this opportunity of expressing my regret at a condition of the law which permits a boy to troll for pike or set lines with live frog bait for idle amusement, and at the same time lays the teacher of that boy open to the penalty of fine and imprisonment if he uses the same animal for the purpose of exhibiting one of the most beautiful and instructive of physiological spectacles—­the circulation in the web of the foot.  No one could undertake to affirm that a frog is not inconvenienced by being wrapped up in a wet rag and having his toes tied out, and it cannot be denied that inconvenience is a sort of pain.  But you must not inflict the least pain on a vertebrated animal for scientific purposes (though you may do a good deal in that way for gain or for sport) without due licence of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, granted under the authority of the Vivisection Act.

So it comes about that, in this year of grace 1877, two persons may be charged with cruelty to animals.  One has impaled a frog, and suffered the creature to writhe about in that condition for hours; the other has pained the animal no more than one of us would be pained by tying strings round his fingers and keeping him in the position of a hydropathic patient.  The first offender says, “I did it because I find fishing very amusing,” and the magistrate bids him depart in peace—­nay, probably wishes him good sport.  The second pleads, “I wanted to impress a scientific truth with a distinctness attainable in no other way on the minds of my scholars,” and the magistrate fines him five pounds.